For Savage Defense the change we're thinking about would probably be instead of reducing the next physical attack for X damage, it would instead absorb X damage for some duration. Big single target hits would probably drop the shield either way, but all the dinkier hits from pack pulls would be mitigated rather well. It's probably something you'll see fleshed out on the PTR.

It actually helps a lot less than you think depending on how they implement it. Right now the problem isn't dinky hits vs super big hits - it's super big hits vs mostly big hits.

Heroic mobs can hit for upwards of 10-20k depending. SD currently gets wasted on the 10k, but not as much as you'd think - close to 5-10k is wasted. That'll help, but if that 10k gets refreshed by another crit (which is almost certainly going to happen with swipe) you're not gaining anything if you wouldn't have gotten hit in that time.

Now if they allow SD to stack in damage absorption that would solve both issues and make the only problem that it doesn't actually scale with incoming damage. Still, it would go a long, long way towards fixing most of the issues with SD and making it significantly stronger for bears.

Lacerate bonus threat has been removed and replaced with increased initial damage done.

Savage Defense has been redesigned slightly. Instead of a single charge absorption, it now places an absorption effect on the druid absorbing up to 35% of the druid's attack power (modified by mastery, if applicable) in damage and lasting 10 seconds. There are no longer any charges on the effect.

Swipe (Bear) cooldown has been reduced to 3 seconds, down from 6, and is now trainable at level 18 (training cost has been reduced). In addition, the bonus threat from this ability has been removed and replaced with increased damage done.

Thrash bonus threat has been removed and replaced with increased damage done.

They are increasing our dps as bears - in a way that I am guessing will be threat neutral in the current content, but will scale better as our gear improves. I am sure someone will be testing this on the PTR shortly to provide some actual numbers.

\My problem is that with the DPS increase+threat decrease we wont have anymore AoE threat than before

Swipe is not being improved as a threat output, no. It's increasing the damage done by 50%, which is great, but the actual threat will not be increased.Thrash is the same, save they're fixing the bleed being mitigated by armor. So there's an improvement.The big improvement is in doing an extra swipe every 6 seconds, which will double the amount of threat produced by swipe in 6 seconds. That's a pretty big deal. Between that and the bleed fix for thrash things should be improved.

The lacerate boost is the real win here; lacerate will be a bit less in threat on normal hits but much better on crits. It'll be doing pretty huge damage.

I was able to tank ZG last night and i noticed my damage increase (after recount/skada where fixed). I had simalare numbers to you Fel. I did notice a problem with my swipe/thrash macro. It was using thrash, then swipe but wouldn't do the 2nd swipe from lowered CD until it could thrash 1st again. Any help?

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